In Kino’s Journeys, the title character is a teenage girl who travels the wilderness on her talking motorcycle, stopping only briefly in each isolated city-state she finds, observing life while reserving judgement, surviving unpleasant encounters using her wits and pistols.

Gakuen Kino is a parody spin-off, featuring magical girl Kino and her talking cellphone strap, fighting monsters in a not-so-ordinary high school.

I’ve read several of the Kino stories, and have finished about 33% 68% 98% of the first novel, but I found the mere existence of Gakuen Kino so amusing that I bought it on sight, and hope to read it at some point. Sadly, while it has been scanned in, no OCR’d, proofread edition is available, so I can’t run it through my scripts to speed up the reading experience. It will have to wait.

I grabbed the scans to get the interior illustrations, but I noticed something a bit unusual about them. The zip file correctly lists it as 学園キノ by 時雨沢恵一, but when you unpack it, the directory claims to contain 面白くないキノ by オナニ沢ケーイチ.

For the kana-deprived, the title has been changed to Omoshirokunai Kino (Boring Kino), by Onani-sawa Keiichi instead of Sigusawa Keiichi. Onani means masturbation. The scans match my copy of the book, so it’s just editorial commentary rather than vandalism, but still a bit of a surprise.

Anyway, here’s one of the color plates from inside the book. No onani, please!

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“Shut up, kid; that’s the way I tell it.”

There’s a fresh manga adaptation of the original Dirty Pair SF novels running in Japan (via The Leaning Tower of Damocles). I will cheerfully confess that I didn’t like the illustration style used for the novels, but I’m not sure this is an improvement. I’ll take the Eighties anime & comic versions, please; these are a bit over the top.

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I am compelled to make the following observations about the first novel in the Asobi ni iku yo! series.

1. The series title is given a wonderful Engrish translation as furigana: “Us It goes to play in Your house”.

2. The compound noun 食料合成機 (literally “food synthesis machine”) has the following pronunciation as furigana: ソイレント・グリーン.

For the kana-impaired, instead of shokuryou-gouseiki, it’s to be read as soirento gureen. Not having seen the anime (yet), I do not know if this joke was carried over.

Unrelated: A shrine maiden, a buddhist nun, and a “catholic” nun walk into a bar, and…

No, wait, that’s not a bar, it’s a porn novel. My mistake.

Pete reminds me that I haven’t recently expressed appreciation for the talents of Haruka Tomatsu, who caught my attention not for her voice-acting in the popular anime series Kannagi, but for her insane cuteness (or cute insanity) in the music video for the OP.

Then I saw the ED…

Sadly, some of the songs she’s recorded for other series aren’t as good as either of the Kannagi songs, but they seem to sell well, and her pretty-seiyuu singing group Sphere seems to be successful. She makes a darn nice bikini model, too.

[side note: the embedded video neatly demonstrates why most fansub “typographers”/“typesetters” should be bound with duct tape, sealed in a barrel, and dropped off a cliff. The whole point of supplying karaoke-style romanized lyrics is so that someone can sight-read them to learn the words. Gratuitous animation (bounce! bounce!) significantly reduces readability. Use a crisp clean font, with good contrast and the entire phrase displayed at once, and save the special effects for your MySpace site.]

Live-action adaptation of Noir in the works. I have mixed feelings about this, but as long as they don’t use that damn song, I’ll give it a shot.

Just spotted on Amazon: Kaleido Star: Season Two with Bonus OVA

Nice to see a box set with the OVA, but that’s not the fun part. This is:

Frequently bought with…

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Stumbling across this screencap from the current Strike Witches 2 episode, I found it curiously Kino-esque.

One wonders if her legs talk.